The Obama Wiretapped Trump Story Goes Back To January, David French Story

The big story today is President Trump tweet that Obama wiretapped him.

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

On January 11, 2017 David French Wrote: Earlier this evening, just before Barack Obama delivered his farewell address, three disturbing reports emerged — in rapid succession. Let’s break them down. First, CNN reported that intelligence officials gave Donald Trump classified documents showing there are allegations that Russian intelligence officials “claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.”

The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible. The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Mr. Trump.

More: One reason the nation’s intelligence chiefs took the extraordinary step of including the synopsis in the briefing documents was to make the President-elect aware that such allegations involving him are circulating among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress and other government officials in Washington, multiple sources tell CNN. This synopsis apparently referenced a number of information sources, including a “dossier” that has been circulating around Washington for a number of weeks. These are the “memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative,” but it wasn’t an intelligence briefing. It was an opposition research report that collected a number of rumors about Trump and Russia — some potentially verifiable, others not.

Here’s USA Today’s Marc Ambinder, explaining: Second, after CNN aired its report, Buzzfeed decided to publish a copy of the dossier — putting all the rumors into the public square, including unverified and almost certainly unverifiable rumors that are deeply personal and profoundly humiliating for Trump. I won’t dignify the report with a link, but some of the rumors detail alleged personal misconduct. Others detail disturbing claims of coordination between Russian intelligence and Trump campaign officials — claims that can be investigated rather easily.

In fact, news organizations were investigating those claims even as Buzzfeed vomited out the entire report. Here’s Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith explaining his reasoning: This is ridiculous. How can “Americans make up their own minds” when they have no ability to fact-check the allegations? The public knows nothing about the sources, nothing about the underlying claims, and has no means of discovering the truth.

Buzzfeed admits that “there is serious reason to doubt the allegations.” It’s been using its journalistic resources trying to verify the claims for “weeks” and hasn’t been able to. But “Americans” can somehow do what Buzzfeed can’t? This isn’t transparency; it’s malice. Third, as debate raged across Twitter, the Guardian dropped its own bomb onto the debate: The Guardian has learned that the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials.

The Fisa court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation. It turns out, however, this information wasn’t exactly new. Heat Street reported on the warrant the night before the election: Two separate sources with links to the counter-intelligence community have confirmed to Heat Street that the FBI sought, and was granted, a FISA court warrant in October, giving counter-intelligence permission to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.